If Eleanor Grace Miller’s oil-on-board still life paintings of fabric and solid objects were photographs, the camera would have to be suspended in perpendicular alignment from the ceiling – and the lens would have to stay open for a long, long time. So dark and rich are Miller’s colors, that an almost surreal sense of depth infuses each carefully-arranged scene.

Miller’s work was lately on view at the wonderful Garrison Art Center, which backs up to the icy Hudson River in Putnam County just across from West Point; the show, with Hudson Valley painter Donald Alter, closed today.

Although realistic and fully representational, these are views that do not exist in everyday life – indeed, they are created by the painter herself; Miller has designed some of the patterns on the pottery and material in the paintings. So each view is not merely a collection of items interpreted by the artist – the still life itself is the creation. Each painting seems an execution of the original vision of color, design, and assembly.

The dominant colors are blacks and reds and gold, with bowls and fruit serving as the three-dimensional focal points for swaths of brilliant fabric, some of it designed by the artist specifically for the painting. The result is brilliant – a golden view at a simple world.

The object is a bright and clear vision. As Miller says in her exhibit statement with a quick slash of wit: “I dislike beige. I find it arbitrary: I like the clarity of color.”

With the sensational success of Milk, an Oscar contender if ever one rolled on a projector, we have new project for Mssrs. Penn and Van Sant – another ode to a governmental folk hero in the making. For nothing captures these early Depression Era II days of strange municipal doings than a little side project I like to call Blago! (The Musical).

Now, I’m not generally a fan of musicals – in my experience, people don’t generally break into elaborate song and dance routines during the grind of everyday life. But I’m thinking of something more along the lines of Blues Brothers, a great Chicago musical movie with its big pay-off in Richard J. Daley Plaza – maybe a State House rock opera in the style of Quadrophenia, with the mod/mad Guv driving his heavily-mirrored career scooter over the cliff to the crash of the last power chord.

Not since Chicago mayor Anton (Tony) Cermak traveled to Miami in early 1933 – during the great lame duck last days of Herbert Hoover – has Chicago blood spilled so liberally during a presidential transition. Of course, back in ’33 it was poor Mayor Cermak’s literal blood that washed into Biscayne Bay, as he was shot to death shaking hands with President-elect Roosevelt by an assassin named Giuseppe Zangara – thereby taking a bullet to preserve the life of the man who would converse so famously with the American people about “fear itself” just a month later.

These days, even as we anticipate with barely-concealed glee the next stirring inaugural address, the Chicago blood is all political in nature – that is to say, metaphorical. Yet, as in all great musicals, you can see the next big number coming. Blago! (The Musical) would certainly include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s political death scene, perhaps a fumbling Mercutio’s lament after the self-inflicted wound of barring Roland Burris at the schoolhouse, er, congressional doors for lack of a permission slip from the Illinois Secretary of State.

Rod Blagojevich deftly out-flanked Senator Reid in appointing Burris, the former Illinois Attorney General who seems a decent – if a bit obsessed with grave rubbing and divine ordination of appointments – semi-retired public servant. Now, Blago faces his own public trial by the Illinois Legislature…and you have to wonder if that August body, production plant for Lincoln and Obama, has fallen into yet another clever Blagojevich trap. The incoming President (who has a Swiss watch of a political instinct compared to Reid’s primitive sundial) can hardly be happy about the potential for long Blago defense in the well of the Illinois State Senate. What theater! What drama! What a distraction from the disaster facing the American economy!

Maybe it’s a distraction we need – I, for one, will revel in the political theater and envision the ultimate casting for Blago! (The Musical). Dan Aykroyd’s a little old for the title role, but I think he could’ve done wonders in his Fred Garvin salad days, perhaps throwing down a few Little Walter harp shrieks in the musical numbers. Ditto Kevin Costner, who played the stiff-backed Eliot Ness in The Untouchables and who would’ve made a fine Patrick Fitzgerald. The brilliant Don Knotts is sadly no longer breathing, so we’ll have to cast about for Harry Reid. In my script, Barack Obama would remain serenely off camera, entirely absent but for occasional clips of his best speeches – a one-man center of morality, a uniform Greek chorus. (But I’m really tempted by Nick Nolte in the Bill Ayers part).

We stopped by an office on one of the floors, and the guide made a point of saying that this the “actual working office” of the governor. We were allowed to take pictures of the anteoffice, and there is a portrait of good old Honest Abe next to a statuette of Elvis, which the guide made a point to say is an important possession of the governor.

Under the watchful eye of the great Lincoln, the ego is the Las Vegas Elvis, with all the undertones of the delusions of kingship. That pretty much sums up the Blago. New Yorkers can’t really throw stones at governors these days—the era of Mario Cuomo being long over. But, woah.

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

That’s the same way that Frasier Crane ended his last radio show. This is one pop culture kind of leader.

Yeah. And, if we’re not careful, Blago (a man with a sense of comic drama) might become another midwest cultural hero, an electoral Clyde Barrow. After all, he’s legally innocent – and as Lance Mannion says, “he’s written Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel into his story and with his appointment of Roland Burris he’s added the entire Democratic membership of the United States Senate to his cast of characters.”

And he’s dancing one hell of a political two-step. Cue the Muddy Waters soundtrack. Opening Scene: the Governor’s office, Chicago, Illinois.

In this quirky, personality-driven, iconoclastic corner of the media universe, any kind of year-end list-building runs up hard against two competing factors that tear at any kind of universality: as middle-brow armchair critics, our tastes are rather catholic, but our production is – in the kindest sense – distinctly idiosyncratic.

We write about what we want to write about in these precincts, with neither fame nor money at stake (I’ll resist the obvious jibe about the market-driven and Internet-enabled trajectory of all critical journalism these days).

Nonetheless, newcritics.com faces its second anniversary much as it did the first: committed (very loosely, but still) to a cultural conversation that binds us to a shared experience in film, television, literature, music and all the related art forms. This is no academic forum, however. It’s a collection of media-obsessed consumers who gather around the smoking hearth of opinion, poured neat and without the trappings of a higher calling.

In that spirit, I’d like to offer a few year in review highlights from the newcritics database – you can add your own in the comments, or just wander off on any tangent you choose. And by the way, if you’re a regular here and would like to become a blogger with full posting privileges, just drop me a line.

In brief: we’re Bond fans through and through, and we loved the Joker. No two films elicited the response that these two blockbusters did in 2008 – at least among movies actually released this year (more on that in a moment). Of Bond, M.A. Peel wrote in a decidedly mixed review that “QOS is still big time Hollywood in its excess best. It’s slick, polished, and exhausting to watch.” And NYC Weboy summed it up well, I think: “This is not your father’s Bond; this is not your brother’s Bond, either. And, frankly, we are better for it … The gin-sozzled, dapper dressed, gadget-y plaything of the past doesn’t suit our times, or our cultural needs.” Chris Nolan’s already-iconic The Dark Knight wore more passionate reviews and comments. Jason Chervokas called it “modern Gothic eye candy of the highest order” and argued that TDK ” is almost certainly the best Batman movie that will ever be made, up there with the best Batman stories of Steve Englehart and Frank Miller.” Blue Girl also dug the flick, but she posted a review worthy of The Catwoman anyway, ticky-tackying some feline flings at some of the performances: “If that’ll bother you because you must be so serious about The Batman, please click away so your delicate psyches are not damaged for all eternity.” Meoww!

1967 Movie of the YearBonnie and Clyde

This was a close one: our wildly-successful Wednesday Night at the Movies series kicked off with a 1967-themed film fest, keyed to Mark Harris’s revealing Pictures at a Revolution on the five Best Picture nominees from that revolutionary year. Thanks to Lance Mannion and the Self-Styled Siren, the first newcritics virtual fest was a box office smash and we all spent countless comments on DVD classics – for my money, Bonnie and Clyde‘s bullet-riddled commentary eked out top honors over In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate, the two other ’67 classics that elicited the most passionate discussions. I enjoyed going back and just reading the comments about Bonnie and Clyde (including some New Left insights from Nixonland author Rick Perlstein) and Lance’s primo, quote-filled introduction – a great newcritics moment. Here’s a taste via a comment on the famed death scene from the Sireen: “…they die as the result of institutional corruption and a low trick, and they die in a manner that’s simultaneously beautiful and gruesome, like a saint’s martyrdom. No Code movie would have countenanced the way law enforcement is portrayed there, as simple murder.”

Best Picture – New York PrecinctsRear Window

Our second filmfest was curated by the Siren (hence the more traditional, old-school Hollywood title for this category), with a hand from Mannion and me. And I think the discussion of Hitchcock’s almost over-hyped soundstage thriller edged out the pure LOL appreciation The Apartment and the bloggy ramble through the dark Manhattan of The Sweet Smell of Success. (You may, of course, disagree! It was a great series indeed). Rear Window has always been a favorite, but I really discovered some new territory in the Siren-led discussion. Typical of the eye-opening comments was Tony Dayoub’s: “What I really enjoyed about the “NY” location is its artifice. It really contributes to this being the landscape of the apartment-bound Jeff’s mind. Each little window is a peek into a nightmare Jeff has about commitment to Lisa or the loneliness should they break up.”

Best Dramatic Television SeriesMad Men

We loved it. We hated it. We loved to hate it. In truth, AMC’s Mad Men was almost universally acclaimed by the so-called professional critics – and panned, in a strangely respectful and admiring fashion, here at newcritics. But it was the conversation that made it so damned fun, the gathering here each week (even in the age of Tivo, for all love) to live-snark the stylish series, captained by M.A. Peel or yours truly. The thing is: both Ms. Peel and I always loved the ambition of Mad Men, the basic idea, and the setting. We just parted ways with Matthew Weiner on the execution, particularly in the writing around the two central characters, the pretender Don Draper and his psychotic mannequin wife Betty. Though we dug the ensemble, work-a-day cast a Sterling Cooper. Still, the gathering was the thing – as Ms. Peel captured so well in a September lede: “It’s been a week of certifiable madness. Stock market insanity; bank and company failures on an epic scale; the dollar amount of 700 billion said with a straight face. And now the maddening reality of the loss of Paul Newman, who embodied the sea change of generational sensibility that is rocking Don Draper’s world…”

Best Reality Television SeriesProject Runway

For sheer snipery set on the West Side of Manhattan, nothing turned the fashionista amplifiers to eleven like the tear-laden, back-stabbing, playground of ambition that was Project Runway – and for part of its run (how we mourned when it didn’t last!) newcritics was fortunate in having Claire and Jennifer as our intrepid guides and weekly hosts. Here’s Claire before last season’s finale: “Have the contestants been suitably humanized so that you care who wins or loses? Has that crazily-haired Christian burrowed his way into your hard little hearts? More importantly, are you ready for Posh Spice guest judging? Frankly, that last bit, I am not. Posh both frighten and annoys me. Plus I think she has dreadful fashion sense.” Let’s hope PR blogging returns in 2009 – maybe we’ll give Tim Gunn and call and see if he can persuade our newcritics?

Almost despite itself – and in defiance of a helacious mid-year hacking attack – newcritics carries on as a small-scale center of middlebrow cultural attutide and conversation. It’s been a great year, thanks to all the bloggers and commenters and readers and linkers. Let’s do it again, shall we?

The action films of the 1970s shot in and around New York embrace a curb-level realism – an obsession with gritty locations – that no studio or backlot can possibly reproduce. The storefronts, dented cars, barren parks and filigreed subway els dress movies like The Seven-Ups, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, and the French Connection, racing along with the action in glimpses and high contrast light and murky shadow. But there was life in those shops and apartments and row houses, life in a city that no longer exists, a life that was both tougher and less material than the New York three decades on – a city that still expects cartoonish credit-laden consumption even as the consumer markets that created neon expectations can no longer deliver on the promise.

In one of the Bronx neighborhoods Ray Scheider drove so recklessly through in chase of some drug-dealing punks, a dysfunctional family of Italian-Americans sweated out the tough times – times that inspired Twisted Head, a hilarious and cutting memoir by its youngest progeny, the actor and writer Carl Capotorto.

You may remember Capotorto as “Little Pauli” in The Sopranos, but there was nothing of the mythical mob glamor about his childhood in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. Capotorto was the youngest child of a family dominated by a father with a violent temper, and the book’s title comes from the literal translation of Capotorto – “twisted head” – which seems so perfectly suited to the temperament of Philip Vito Capotorto.

The Bronx of Carl Capotorto’s youth was still recognizable in the Bronx of the 1980s, where I arrived as a rookie political reporter for The Riverdale Press. Congressman Mario Biaggi, the pornographic Globe Theater, the shops on Arthur Avenue, Bronx Park and even Cappi’s Pizza and Sangweech Shop under the el on White Plains Road are all familiar.

But equally familiar is the close-in third generation immigrant American experience in New York; mine was Irish and based around Yonkers, but Capotorto’s experience was the same as many of the kids I knew who grew up around Dunwoodie in the 60s and 70s. I recognize the characters from their families, and from my own – the always-simmering pot of “gravy,” the uncles and their tales of European war, the trips to Playland, the allure of “the city,” the music, the cars, the long family gatherings.

Capotorto keeps his personal memoir moving and although his father’s anger provides the dramatic core of the story, the episodes with the women in his life – his mother, his sisters, his grandmother – give Twisted Head much of its richness and humor, as does the author’s struggle with homosexuality and acceptance in adolescence. The story never tips into either self-absorbed pathos or two-dimensional ethnic and sexual cliche; Capotorto deftly balances the details of the city and the times with the story arc of his family and his life.

In the end, despite the author’s evident personal struggle, you’re not at all sorry for Carl Capotorto’s early life in the Bronx. It was, after all, a rich childhood filled with picaresque characters that gave Capotorto a rare gift: a story well worth telling.

Among true fans of Mad Men, Jon Hamm’s loss at the Emmys was something of a body blow. Hamm’s portrayal of the surly two-faced creative director Don Draper on the early 60s period drama was the favorite going in, a buttoned-up Madison Avenue heir to Tony Soprano – the new leading leading man.

But as good as Hamm is physically – and he does seem literally cut from the paper doll outline of Matthew Weiner’s storyboards – his character slips and slides, particularly in this second season as the rest of the Sterling Cooper ensemble cast rises so surely. At times violent, at times wistful, at other times seemingly confused, Don Draper doesn’t so much drive the action on Madison Avenue as drift along with the current; we won’t speak of the strangely-locused Ossining sub-drama, a distracting bit of melodrama (tinged with faux existentialism) unworthy of the soaps for which Sterling Cooper’s non-superstars wrote copy.

It’s Jon Hamm I worry about. The star of “Mad Men,” Hamm is a swoon-inducing, physically graceful actor — a through-and-through Hollywood person, without much training in New York’s Method-derived acting styles. As he remembered it in a panel discussion in January, the first scene he shot of “Mad Men,” in which he plays the evasive and cruel Don Draper, required a flurry of stage business. Cigarettes had to be lighted, rooms had to be crossed, shirts had to be changed, ties tied. Hamm says he struggled with this manual ballet, but anyone who saw the first season of “Mad Men” can testify that he made it look natural. And not only natural but also intensely expressive: Hamm in the first “Mad Men” season made midcentury pantomine both nervous and beautiful, elegant actions that sublimated Draper’s anarchic energies.

But this season, the Draper character is losing his touch, and the part doesn’t require so much dexterity. Draper loses control of his car and his reputation; he shows less Rat Pack finesse. The camera seems mad at Draper, and it gives him long, stung looks, during which he has almost nothing to do but be. Sometimes these are cutaways from when another character is dressing him down, flattering him or exposing him. Sometimes they are close-ups on moments of self-doubt. But Hamm, the actor, does not seem to like the silence, and he has a hard time staying steady as Don in the quiet interludes.

At these times, an incongruous vulnerability presents itself in the reptilian Draper. Accidentally, Hamm seems to flash on an exaggerated look of melancholy or distance — as if the actor were thinking, I don’t want to be this man. Perhaps Hamm, like many Hollywood stars, wants to be liked above all, and Draper is written as less likable in nearly every episode. If the show is to mature and last, Hamm will have to risk being hated.

The demands of what Heffernan quotes Vincent Canby as defining as the “megamovie” on television – that is to say, holding a cinematic emotional center week after week after long, long week – may not be possible for Jon Hamm in Mad Men. James Gandolfini, as Heffernan says, “was responsible for ensuring the show’s continuity and coherence even as everything perpetually changed around him: directors, writers, cast, crew.”

But I’d suggest Gandolfini had a huge assist not just from his supporting cast (most notably Edie Falco as Carmelo Soprano, who carried an emotional weight a hundred times greater than the cartoonish Betty Draper character) from one key decision made at the outset: setting The Sopranos in northern New Jersey and shooting all its exteriors there. If Matthew Weiner had taken one key aspect of The Sopranos with him to Mad Men, it should have been Chase’s move to liberate a big dramatic series from the soundstage.

Gandolfini inhabited a real landscape, from the bottom of his suburban driveway to downtown Newark to the various Turnpike exits and strip malls. They helped to make Tony Soprano real. Not only is Jon Hamm in super-stylized costume, he’s also very much on the super-stylized set. Quite a bit of the real New York on 1962 still exists, but we never see Don Draper walk its streets. Instead, we get obvious Hollywood backlot exteriors and banal gaffes like Draper parking his car right in front of Sterling Cooper on near-empty Madison Avenue, and Betty riding horses in what is obviously Southern California.

Tonight, it looks like the ever-developing cast at Sterling Cooper is evolving still; in this second season, the best moments of Mad Men have some out of the workplace. That’s beginning to seem real. I’m suspending my disbelief from 9 to 5. But not fully from 10 to 11 every Sunday night. Because they haven’t given me New York.

The best book ever written about the scourge of drugs and the racial chasm in the deep interior of Brooklyn was Greg Donaldson’s gritty 1994 true life new journalism book, The Ville. It covered the lives of two men – one a Housing cop and the other a gang member – along with a vast cast of extras in a two-square mile area encompassing parts of the Brownsville and East New York. In The Ville, justice was elusive and escape from “the life” almost impossible. But it was the portrayal of race and an endless cycle of urban failure that stayed with this reader.

The new first novel by Justin Peacock, A Cure for Night, doesn’t really pack the same chilling portraiture as Donaldson’s non-fiction account of the early 90s, but it does build a cinematic and dramatic story that contains the same elements of crime and race and failure in the public housing projects of New York. At its center are two public defenders – Joel Deveraux, a former white shoe litigator whose personal drug habit destroyed a highly-paid career, and Myra Goldstein, a feisty and committed defense attorney – drawn together over a shooting in the courtyard of a Brooklyn housing project.

The story unfolds mostly in dialogue and it’s got a ripped-from-the-headlines feel that ties it closely to some of the best crime procedurals on television. Peacock’s story is undoubtedly authentic, based on his own experiences as a defense lawyer, and he reveals a healthy disrespect for a criminal defense system that seems like a revolving door of poorly-tried cases and quickie plea bargains.

The crime at the center of the novel forces a view of the racial realities of life in inner city public housing that is free of any blinders: a white college student is killed during a meeting with a black drug dealer. Naturally, the murder hits the tabloids. Peacock’s lead character is weak, only semi-skilled, and easily pushed about by the currents in his life – he’s a follower. Luckily, he’s paired with the best of the Brooklyn Public Defender’s office, a young woman driven by both her belief in the law and her own abilities.

It’s a procedural whose best moments lie not in the highest drama, but in the mundane turning of the court calendar and the droning job toward a verdict. It’s a darkly liberal book: some victims clearly have no chance in the society Peacock presents. But it’s also a tale that is frost-bitten by a cold existentialism; this is life in New York for many people and it will always be so. The title is, in a way, a kicker to a journalist’s front-page story – there really is no cure for the night.

I believe we must treat our political foes with respect in the arena of public opinion. And so I will dedicate this post to the Governor of Alaska. This is Banned Books Week, and it’s always appropriate to look at what drives literary censorship in this country. According to the American Library Association, more than 400 books were challenged in 2007. The 10 most challenged titles were:

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Click here to see why these books were challenged. And read one of ’em. That’ll show the bastards.

For many years now, curmudgeon-blogger-painter-author James Howard Kunstler has been predicting the downfall of America’s vast consumer society in stark terms, in his non-fiction books (like his 2006 The Long Emergency) and on his iconic blog, Clusterfuck Nation. Read Kunstler for a couple of weeks, and he will piss you off. Read him for a few months, and you’ll question the financial underpinnings of the western world – some of the verities slowly begin to fray. Two months ago, for example, Kunstler posted a typical essay called “The Coming Re-Becoming” that factored the assumptions we Americans make for our strength and general well-being in the alleys and by-ways of sheer luck:

Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.

Fortunate, indeed – and now that the entire financial system is shaking, I’d like to recommend Kunstler’s 10th novel, World Made by Hand, a sharp cinematic imagining on everyday American life after the failure of the energy grid.

I read the book between trips upstate this summer, which was perfectly appropriate, as World Made by Hand unfolds in the sleepy town of Union Grove, New York along the Hudson River north of Albany – a region down on its economic luck even before the apocalyptic events hinted at in Kunstler’s tale. But as Robert Earle, a former software engineer, attempts to balance his base own survival with more human pursuits in a town edging toward violence and anarchy, we glimpse that world through his eyes.

The New York State Thruway as a walking trail. Abandoned strip malls, gas stations, and shopping outlets. The absence of mass media, except for the occasional Bible-thumping when the power cranks the radio back on. The real meaning of horsepower. In short, it’s like a field trip to an Amish village or a 19th century agrarian recreation – but littered with carcasses of automobiles, commerce, mass production and media. The Hudson is again the super-highway it was when the French and British fought for it. All food is produced locally. Drugs are scarce to non-existent, and contagion sweeps away whole generations. Recycling isn’t a feel-good fad – it’s survival. And violence in the absence of real law threatens the last of civilization.

The people in World Made by Hand are thin; they’re hungry, sure – but there’s not too much meat to their characters, either. Women fare the worst: feminism has not survived, and they are reduced either to a means of production or sad, wandering specters. The men aren’t much better, because life has become cheapened and introspection has as much validity as 50-inch Trinitron.

The most affecting character is the cultish preacher Brother Jobe who comes to town to build a new community of believers, only to find personal tragedy. Jobe has seen trouble all over the east coast, and knows that his chances in upstate New York are his last; although things are bad, they’re not as bad as elsewhere – there are terrorist bombs and lynch mobs across the land. The failed nation is rarely addressed directly, but unfolds in conversation – like this one between Earle and his new live-in lover, a young widow of Union Grove’s increasing violence:

“The world has become such a wicked place,” she said quietly, just a statement of fact

To a writer and soap-box shouter like Kunstler, World Made by Hand is not so much of a warning as a promise. Yet, you can also sense a yearning from the author – who lives, after all, in Sarasota Springs – for a return to that earlier time. Indeed, there are portions of the new life in Union Grove that are admirable; the reliance on a communitarian movement for survival is one. A closer tie to the means of food production is another. You get the feeling the author himself thinks he might do well in the reinvention years he hints at in economic/political blog posts circa 2008.

This economic spasm is a result of the credit explosion in all its variety and complexity and derivation. Kunstler’s bleak future stems from energy policy. Yet the events of these last two weeks can be tucked neatly into the back story for World Made by Hand. It’s a good read. And it sure as hell beats watching the Dow or sorting through the bailout paperwork.

As I mentioned in our last outing, the life in the edges in Mad Men is often more entertaining than the faux suburban turmoil that makes up the lives of Don and Betty Draper. The world of Sterling Cooper is really coming into its own in season two, even as the cardboard angst of Ossining (a bizarre choice to begin with) begins to fade. One of the great characters from those edges is the firm’s founder and senior partner, Bert Cooper, played with (sound)stage presence by the veteran Robert Morse. Almost all of the Morse scenes are good ones, and his character is the moral center of life at the firm – his square seniority balanced by the picaresque ways of his junior, Roger Sterling.

Over at AMC’s Mad Men site, there’s a short interview with Morse and i think it captures some of the enthusiasm around creating the Sterling Cooper atmosphere. Live-blogging starts at 10 tonights, so in lieu of a longer post, here’s an excerpt:

Q: Do you feel like you’re stepping back in time with Mad Men?

A: Not really stepping back in time, but there are many values and things in the script that are reminiscent — secretaries and typewriters, etc. — of my days when How to Succeed [in Business Without Really Trying] was on Broadway. So it is a reminder of things past, a little Proustian. Otherwise, it’s fun wearing a goatee and a mustache and having my hair plastered down. It’s fun to look completely different than you are. They write Bert Cooper very cleverly. He’s an oddball. He walks around with no shoes, his office is completely decorated in early Japanese stuff. He has these fun, odd quirks.

Q: Is it true you visit the set, even on days when you’re not filming?

A: That’s right. Exactly. I love to go into the studio on days when I’m not even doing anything. It’s like my senior club. Some people go to senior centers, well I go to my senior center. I think I’m the oldest of the group — the only one who has lived through this period. I just love this show: I show up and hit the marks and say the lines and go home. And then show up the next day with the paper and visit with everybody and have a free lunch.

Is boredom of interest? The affliction troubling the two main characters of AMC’s wildly popular Mad Men seems to be some type of low-grade non-fever, the after effects of a suburban existentialist bomb that exploded far off camera leaving viewers wandering the frozen landscape of Draperville without the pleasure of fire. Don and Betty Draper are the ice-cold post-apocalyptic center of what is actually a nifty office drama whirling around them, but they move in the slow motion zombie dance of dead-eyed survivors – oh, so weary with life on Madison Avenue and Ossining and the country club. Maybe they’ll figure in Cormac McCarthy’s next descent to the depths – or George Romero’s, anyway.

Don Draper sucks the life out of the tasty little agency storyline slowly unfolding at Sterling Cooper; in truth, the man simply doesn’t have a real job. He shows up, sucks down nicotine, beds a client, tosses back a few drinks, and turns his thumb up or down on creative ideas like some early 60s Madison Avenue caesar. He never works. Not like Darren Stevens. Not like Jim Blandings. Hell, not even like partner Roger Sterling or sales director Duck Phillips, two far more authentic characters who you can genuinely sense have an eye on the agency’s bottom line.

And not like the band of ambitious junior people: Peggy, Sal, Paul and Pete. These people have plans. They have schemes. They have principles they’re willing to compromise in order to satisfy ambition. They’re interesting.

Betty Draper is a pouty mannequin; Don a brooding extra. They’re bored with their lives, having imagined more, but nothing seems to drive any real crisis. Moreover, they’re not likable, in the way that draws an audience to follow them. Sure they’re bad people. So were Tony and Carmela Soprano. But in The Sopranos, Tony and Carm dominated the center – the vast and fascinating ensemble moved around them. Don and Betty…no. Maybe they’re too pretty. Or maybe the writing isn’t up to scratch. And nor are they the literary successors to Frank and April Wheeler of Revolutionary Road, either. Yates told a suburban horror story in the guise of everyday life – he meant to horrify, and he did. (I’ll be curious to compare Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as the Wheelers in the upcoming Sam Mendes flick to the cardboard Drapers).

So I’m watching Mad Men in the edges, and enjoying it more. Peggy’s ambition is growing and she’s willing to play by the boys’ rules to succeed. Pete’s feeling needed beyond his family’s wealth. And Duck’s dealing with the make-or-break midlife in the killing fields of midtown. These people feel real and their dialogue works; further, they wear their period outfits and settings well. Last week, Peggy’s move on the men’s club turned on her break room conversation with Joan – she got tough advice and she took it. Pete renewed his partnership with Peggy. Roger brokered a deal between the feuding Duck and Don. Paul took a chance on a big creative idea.

Take out the Drapers’ boring boredom, and you had movement – you had drama, in the collision of ambition and opportunity.